"An amazing dream covers me.
I walk, letting birds fly away.
All I touch is in myself.
I have thrown away all the limitation."
- Jean Bastille's Poem, Air and Dream, Bachelard

In the "Air and Dream" written by Bachelard, the finality of imagination is Jonah complex. It is the image made in our unconsciousness when we were in our mothers' wombs, and it is that we feel comfortable and peaceful when we are in certain space as if we were covered by it. A woman's womb as a container has been handled in my previous works, and the red shoes appearing together with the womb show the materialistic property of things, instead of the womb, and they function as a guide in reality.
Highheels, which are the object for display and for ownership, emphasize that to become a woman is to become an image and they function as a cultural device of feminity. High-heeled shoes occupy the minimum space and also connote the dramatic implication that women are weak and powerless. At this time, sexuality performs the function of a social system of seeing through violence rather than the private and subjective expression. It is true that natural or idealistically perfect space doesn't exist. Nevertheless, human sexuality of today is not natural because we, who reside in memories, fantasy, and unconscious forms under symbolical and media-concentrated environment, don't belong to the sexuality that can be called natural and instinctive process.

From the iconographic viewpoint, the feminine image of shoes can be regarded same as Pandora's box. The shoes get to have the characteristics of mystery and temptation through Pandora's associative action. Two motives that become the center of Pandora's iconography and are peculiar in the mythical thought are the mysterious feminity which is hidden behind the mask of temptation and the woman's curiosity that is dangerous enough to violate something (Laura Mulvey). It was forbidden to open the box, but she yielded to her curiosity and finally opened it. So, all the evils in the box were released to the world and only a piece of hope remained in it. The red highheels can be used for the reproduction of the mystery and threats that are made by the concept of women's sexuality in patriarchy.
If shoes are fetish and reproduce women's sexuality by transposing it with mystery and threat, my curiosity can be interpreted as curiosity for the mystery of personifying myself like Pandora's curiosity for the contents in the shoes. And my desire can be re-interpreted as self-reflective desire of searching feminity itself. In my works, this curiosity is shaped into the smoke of a bush of ashy flowers that is scattered in the red shoes like a group of devils coming from Pandora's box. The fixed stare at the red highheels as a fetish target of attracting eyes remains a mystery like Pandora's box as a symbol of having the memory of uneasiness while women's sexuality is idealized in imagination and it becomes excessively significant.
The form of a human being whose legs only are totally exposed becomes an unsafe being through the smoke of nothingness (Sexuality and Space: House, Jeong Sang-Hee, Preface of An Exhibition, 2008). The consistency of fetishism as a fetishistic target of red shoes and legs shows a fiction of sexuality. In the reduced space of red highheels as a guide in reality, it is expanded into the space for the smoke and the gas that transiently disappear like the bush of grayish flowers. It may be the way of occupying space that I have dreamed of (memories and self-consciousness disappear). Space is disappearing time. Time is flowing space. The space of various styles that we live in and experience creates the way we live in space. And to choose the space is our role.

In the contemporary world, which is an increasingly virtual one, the drawing, which was previously a preliminary work for the tableaux, becomes a special medium of expression because of the immediacy it provides. In fact, it is becoming a genre of art making in and of itself. Drawing poses questions about the direct relationship between the self and the body, further increasing the significance of the medium as a format for art making.
This is the 8th installment of Project Exhibitions to explore drawing as its theme.